Posts Tagged ‘C’

What would a numerical representation of your DNA look like? Simply replacing the letters with numbers would make a very long string of only 4 numerals: 1=A, 2=C, 3=G, 4=T, it doesn’t really matter, but the chances of ever finding this string in pi (before you die) are almost nil. There’s always the possibility you just haven’t looked far enough yet, sure, but it’s more likely that the digits of pi are not normally distributed. I’m no theoretical mathematician, but the digits seem random—in such a way that no single numeral (try six) could go missing for the space your DNA requires. It would be very odd if, say, a billion trillion digits in, pi starts using only 4s, 5s, 8s, and 0s for the next, oh, three billion digits.

You’ll notice I haven’t used my car since the snow started Friday afternoon.

Snow makes the windows brighter, so much sun is reflected back from the ground. Now I understand the first line of AC’s “Winter’s Love”—

I love this light in wintertime.

—which may be the best song ever written, in my humble opinion. (Besides “Hallelujah” maybe.) No matter where I am or how many times I’ve heard it, those harmonies and chords will change something inside me and lift my spirit. I wouldn’t say it like that if it weren’t true. Animal Collective has some really good, wide-ranging stuff.

I’ve been learning how to play “Doggy”/”Two Corvettes” from Campfire Songs and “Did You See the Words?” from Feels. The latter has one of the trickiest timings I have attempted to play. I don’t know exactly which it is, but the upbeat and downbeat are either equally emphasized or given alternate dominance from phrase to phrase, measure to measure. On the album version, the crash cymbal is never on the downbeat (with the bass drum, which is what your ears expect to hear) and the song is structured around this detail, but your head still wants to bounce with the boom-CHK boom-CHK instead of the CHK-boom CHK-boom. Avey’s vocal rhythms are so syncopated that you switch back and forth from hearing the down- or upbeat as the pulse. Oh and the harmonies are great, too.

Yesterday morning I went out and measured the snow in my front yard, and ended up between 5 and 6 inches. Which, if the professors are to be believed, makes this the heaviest snowfall in BG since 1987.

His number is 23, which of course was Michael Jordan’s number, but which also reminds me of Pope John XXIII and the mathematician John Nash, who during one of his psychotic episodes thought he was on the cover of Life Magazine disguised as the pope, because 23 was his “favorite prime number.”